Bruce Lee at the 1964 Long Beach Tournament

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee moved to Seattle in 1958 and the next year started teaching Jun Fan Gung Fu (Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu). He dropped out of college in 1964 and moved to Oakland. Later that year, he attended Ed Parker’s first Long Beach International Karate Championship.

This is where he was seen by Hollywood hair stylist Jay Sebring, who worked on the TV series Batman. He gave a film of Bruce at the tournament to William Dozier, the producer and narrator of Batman, who was looking to cast Kato in the new TV series he was developing of the Green Hornet. The rest is history.

A few things to note about Bruce and the development of Jeet Kune Do. Bruce studied Wing Chun for a year and a half, mostly with Wong Shun Leung (although Ip Man liked the kid, who was a movie star in Hong Kong). Lee studied with Wong instead of Ip Man because Lee was one eighth German and so not really Chinese, causing complaints among Ip’s other students.

Lee’s sideways fighting stance and quick insertions/extractions was influenced by the fencing training he received from his brother, Peter.

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Hi. I'm Steve, a professional researcher. I started learning Wing Chun Kung Fu in 2000. Since then, I've trained with some of the best Wing Chun teachers in the world (including Greg LeBlanc and Gary Lam) and done hundreds of hours of research into fight science. This website contains the best of what I've learned. Contact: [email protected]